Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Two of the al­leged bul­lies who frac­tured the skull of Keyshawn Pierre has been sus­pend­ed from Pleas­antville Sec­ondary School, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh said yes­ter­day. He al­so re­vealed that over 2,500 pupils were sus­pend­ed from schools last year.

Gopeesingh was speak­ing to re­porters while tour­ing the fire-dam­aged Pre­sen­ta­tion Col­lege in San Fer­nan­do yes­ter­day. Ex­plain­ing the rise in bul­ly­ing, Gopeesingh said much of the prob­lem stemmed from a lack of guid­ance coun­selling, and a break­down of val­ues in the home and com­mu­ni­ty, as well as a loss of self-es­teem.

In light of this, he said the min­istry plans to hire over 100 ed­u­ca­tion­al be­hav­iour­al and clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gists to deal with emo­tion­al and be­hav­iour­al prob­lems in schools. "There are nu­mer­ous prob­lems with stu­dents and it is now a mat­ter of deal­ing with it from a pre­ven­ta­tive as­pect so that we have ear­ly de­tec­tion of the prob­lem and man­age­ment of prob­lems," Gopeesingh said.

"We have a mul­ti-faceted ap­proach. While we are work­ing to pre­vent this type of thing, we are al­so mov­ing to en­sure that we are tak­ing care of is­sues like morals, val­ues, good health and fam­i­ly life and ethics." He said Gov­ern­ment will be pro­vid­ing more stu­dent coun­selling and sup­port ser­vices at schools.

"We are dou­bling up on guid­ance of­fi­cers and so­cial work­ers. We have 100-plus and we would be mov­ing to hire 100 more. We are go­ing to in­tro­duce a num­ber of ed­u­ca­tion­al, be­hav­iour­al and clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gists in the school." If nec­es­sary, Gopeesingh said, some psy­chi­a­trists will al­so be hired.

Ac­knowl­edg­ing that some­times sus­pend­ed stu­dents have no trained per­son­nel to sup­port them, Gopeesingh said: "We are mov­ing swift­ly to have re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion cen­tres set up so we can have trained per­son­al de­vel­op­ment, and we look for­ward to par­ents and guardians com­ing with them." He ex­plained that af­ter the sus­pen­sion, the stu­dents can re­turn to the school sys­tem.